Broadband Availability By County Type

Patchwork Nation, an effort at characterizing the diversity of American communities by creating a general typology of counties, has turned its lens toward broadband availability, in collaboration with Connected Nation,: Leaving close scrutiny of the typology itself for another day (and the characterization of counties as "Minority Central," "Immigration Nation," and "Evangelical Epicenters"), the map provides a good first cut at assessing socio-demogaphic correlates of broadband availability. As Patchwork Nation's Dante Chinni describes:

So if you were to sit down with a mathematician and try to figure out a formula for connectivity - admittedly a very difficult challenge - it might look something like population density, plus education, plus income, plus civic engagement equals better access to broadband.

Well, having sat down with broadband data at many levels, yup, that predictive model is just about spot on. That said, as presented, I'm not quite sure what to make of the "community engagement" part of the equation. Since that is at the heart of my own work, I have some ideas of what might be meant by it, though.

The future of electrical power in Japan...and Chernobyl...

...oh wait, according to Bloomberg, a big chunk of the budget will be devoted to cleaning up the Fukushima Dai-Ichi reactors. The best guess right now is that it'll take way longer than Three Mile Islahttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifnd (probably on the order of 3 decades) and at least $12 billion: And then there's this little sidebar:

Ukraine is unable to fund alone the cost of a new sarcophagus to cover the burned out reactor at Chernobyl, due to be in place by 2014. The 110 meter-high arched containment structure has a 1.55 billion euro ($2.2 billion) total price tag and the London-based European Bank for Reconstruction and Development has so far raised about 65 percent of that.

Yikes. So much for investing in the next generation of electrical power....

Crowdsourcing Radiation

Tina Rosenberg has an interesting piece in the NYTimes refers to several sites that are crowdsourcing radiation levels in the wake of the tsunami/nuclear catastrophe in Japan.

Here's the view at JapanStatus.org, which posts reported radiation levels:

And here's the view from RDTN.org, which differentiates the colored markers by the entity providing the reading, not by the actual reported radiation level, which is a little confusing and less than informative graphically:

Toward a National Bandwidth Map

So the wires were ablaze yesterday with news of Broadband.com's new national bandwidth map.

Cool, a Google Maps mashup that promises to deliver a bandwidth map of the whole US. Slick.

Drill in a little closer and that map of bubbles comes into clears and more useful focus. The default map, for example, shows only the point locations of DSL central offices, a helpful start. One can select the estimated broadband availability footprint of those locations (green below). And one can look at the footprints of Ethernet over Copper (EoC), as shown in orange in the Metro DC region below. And, as Stacey Higginbotham gushes at GigaOm, this sort of effort has the potential to provide enormous insight into where, at what speed, and at what cost broadband is available.

As an example, the map shows that 7 out of the 10 cities with the most expensive rates per migabit of bandwidth are in North Carolina. As the NC legislature contemplates the "level playing field" bill that would effectively exclude municipal and other public networks, learning that industry is putatively failing tilts the rhetorical scales toward the munis.

But what is the method behind these claims? You'll look in vain for an explanation of how the map works, whence the data come, etc? According to Higginbotham:

The map borrows from the National Broadband Map – launched last month by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration — in the form of an API call that takes some of the data shown on the federally funded map, but it also adds true crowdsourcing and machine learning to deliver a greater variety of information.

Cool! Crowdsourcing! Hive mind! Awesome. But, uh, how? Saying we're tapping the hivemind is one thing. Explaining the method by which that is rendered as an estimate of broadband availability, cost, and speed is another. I'll hold off calling Broadband.com's map the greatest thing since sliced bread until I see more about their data and their methods. Until then it is an enlightening collage.

A sidenote: as I've said many times before, bandwidth is an important issue. But it's not the only concern in the world of broadband policy. For starters, often claims and maps about bandwidth have a huge error term. Any number of discrepancies exist between the benchmark one gets at a terminal and what is actually "available". Nonetheless, bandwidth is among the things that must be considered in a coherent national broadband strategy.

BBand Planning 101

So how do you leverage all that federal broadband data?

Let's say you're in a small to mid-size county not conveniently strapped on to the side of a large metropolitan area. The big fat broadband pipe is not heading your way anytime soon. That means that the core population centers of your county might have access to, say, 7 mbps downstream. And large swaths of the county might have access to wireless. And some have no access at all.

Let's say, you live, for example, in place like Buncombe County, North Carolina. So there's a substantial population (~210 thousand), the preponderance of which lives in or around the county seat.

What do you do?

Well, for starters, consider broadband availability relative to densities of population. Are there any obvious low-hanging fruit that providers have missed?

Not so lucky, usually. In many cases, the low-hanging fruit is long gone. That means that the areas left behind are recalcitrantly lagging.

Now it's time to take a close look at the broadband mapping data from NTIA. A first question: the NTIA collects information on community anchor institutions (CAIs) since these are integral to both sustainable adoption and public computing center aspects of the BTOP program.

So how well connected are those anchor institutions?

Well, in the case of Buncombe County, most are in the Asheville ambit. So most CAIs have access to the broadband. But not all:

The place to start is triaging those institutions (while not accepting the NTIA determination of what is and isn't an anchor institution; update the NTIA list and make sure it is comprehensive). Which are connected? Which of the disconnected should be connected? Which of those could be easily connected? Making these determinations is the first step toward an actionable plan.

A couple glaring deficiencies exist in the NTIA data, of course. Most important, the data are aggregated to US Census blockgroups. That means that, especially in rural areas where this information is most relevant, the footprint of broadband is overstated. Making a location-based strategy is difficult when the location of the broadband footprint is uncertain.

But this is a good first step for framing the game plan.

Where are the muni networks?

Interesting map at Community Broadband Networks, labeling the nation's 130 or so municipal networks.Pretty surprising distribution, with the largest occurrence of networks in Iowa, Georgia and Tennessee (REA and TVA, anyone?).

Broadband hogwash in the NC legislature

Good piece on the challenges of rural broadband in the News and Observer.

I didn't realize that NC beat the Roosevelt administration to the punch, passing a state rural electrification bill a month before the REA came into being. That proud legacy notwithstanding, the state legislature is now weighing a bill that would place all kinds of obstacles in the path of public broadband networks (and presumably public-private ventures by default).

Technology, Plans, Toys

Kaid Benfield is right.

Yes, Gizmo Green seems to be the composite vision of green advertising. Quite true, no new technological product will redeem a sustainable future. And, indeed, rampant consumerism may in fact be a large component of our present unsustainable course.

So, sure, it's pretty easy to deconstruct Gizmo Green as a failed guarantor of sustainability. But to conflate technology with technological products would be a mistake, as is suggested at the end of Benfield's piece.

Perhaps it's fair to say that planners understand the future of technology just as well as technologists understand the future of cities, places, and spaces.

Yet, isn't that the whole reason why planners should insinuate themselves more forcefully into imagining, designing, and building policies toward the technologized future? I.e., if Gizmo City is one potential "imaginary," then shouldn't we all make sure that the we move toward a different one?

Gigabit in Hong Kong

The New York Times piece points out the obvious in describing gigabit broadband for $26/month in Hong Kong:

In the United States, we don’t have anything close to that. But we could. And we should.

Indeed. And we'll only get there with fiber. And the places that have fiber will be on equal footing with world leaders. And those that don't, won't. It's simple as that.